“Don’t be absurd!I am a widow of five and fifty.Who has ever heard of anything so ridiculous?”
“The scoundrel should have asked for my permission!And to hear that he is—” Leith found that he could not go on.It was, in fact, impossible.
“Ask for your permission?My darling, I am your mother, your parent, not some eligible young maiden.Really, you are beginning to upset me.”
Leith took a deep breath.Of course, no one enjoyed hearing such things about a parent, no matter how beloved.But he knew his mother was not wrong about one thing—she had let him carry on as he did for years with little complaint on her part.He supposed he owed her the same courtesy.
“Fine.I allow it.”
“You do notallowanything.”
He whirled around.His mother had not usedthisvoice with him in some time.It was not her usual, gentle voice, the one that told him that she was different from how the world saw her.This voice belonged to the Dowager Marchioness of Leith.This voice was steel and scorn andno-you-may-not-wear-trousers-to-Almack’s.
She stepped towards him.Bonaparte had leapt off the couch now and was, comically, yapping athim, as if he, the purported master of this house, had offended the damned dog, too.
“I am marrying Benjamin and youwillbe happy for me.It is a rare thing to find this kind of joy at my time of life.”
“It only took your best friend dying for you to get it!”
His mother reeled back.
He regretted the words as soon as they were out of his mouth.
But he could see it was too late to take them back.
He resisted the urge to recoil.
Because he knew what was coming.
He had provoked his mother to this extent only a few times in his four-and-thirty years on this earth.
Once, when he was six years old, and he had decided to use her crystal bowls to aid in making his mud pies.
On another occasion, at the age of thirteen, when he had slunk off to Covent Garden unattended to peep at the comely ladies there hawking their services.
The last time, he had been six-and-twenty, and she had attempted to get him to court the daughter of her friend.He had agreed to take the girl and her chaperone to the opera as a courtesy, but then his mistress of the moment, a Mrs.Kitty Williams, had thrown a fit at the prospect, and he had had to cancel with little notice.His mother had been furious.
“I do not know when you became such a cold-hearted man.I suppose it is my fault.I have kept silent too long.”
“Mother, please—”
“Absolutely not.You will hear me.As I have heard you.I do not know how you became so convinced that life can only be lived within your narrow parameters.But if you don’t abandon your rigidity, my boy, and allow yourself to live, then you are very likely to end up both aloneandlonely.Your friends have grown up—but it appears that you are struggling to do the same.”
With one last, disgusted look at him, his mother swept from the room.
Leith stood there, completely at sea.
His mother was not one to make harsh speeches, especially to him, of all people.She thrived on power held in reserve.Furthermore, she usually, well…adored him.
“Absurd!”he fumed to the curtains.
He was the most grown-up person he knew.
His friends and now his mother apparently—they all believed inlove.In happy endings.In the idea that one person could satisfy for a lifetime.
In his opinion, it wastheywho were the children.
And indeed, in that moment, he felt like the oldest man in the world.
